Hello friends!
I have to agree with VsUK
from this thread that this is a serious problem. And the number of reports seems to keep increasing.
I encounter almost the same issue for a THIRD time now. Everything started when I tried to uninstall CFW with a third-party uninstaller, which performed CFW leftovers scan and cleanup. After that system took too long to shut down, and when it rebooted, Windows failed to launch at all. All I could see was a blue screen offering boot/restore/diagnostic options, but those options didn't work too -- no system restore, no safe mode boot, no cmd.exe with admin rights as it couldn't find any admin profiles.
This problem happened twice for me, and both times I used third-party uninstallers to cleanup CFW leftovers BEFORE reboot, and I guess this caused the problem. Whatever you guys do, NEVER EVER use third-party uninstallers to uninstall Comodo products. Always use Comodo native uninstall function via Windows Control Panel and reboot, and ONLY AFTER REBOOT perform leftover cleanups.
I cant say what exactly fixed the issue as I performed different tricks: dism health restore, sfc/scannow, some voodoo dancing, and nothing helped. But both times I succeeded to fix the problem I performed bootrec /fixboot, bootrec /fixmbr in cmd.exe and also booted from linux live usb system and copied files from C:/Windows/System32/config/RegBack (which seems to be a registry backup) to C:/Windows/System32/config/ (which seems to be current registry location). And only after that I could access admin profile from boot menu and use system restore point to rollback and only then reinstall CFW.
As the problem seemed to be caused by third-party uninstallers I believed everything will go fine if I don't use them with Comodo products, but this time the issue started after using Virtual desktop. First, reseting sandbox took too long, so i had to shutdown that popup window manually. After that Windows Explorer started loading my CPU, so i relaunched it from Task Manger, but it kept eating CPU, though no active tasks or programs were running. I tried to reboot Windows, but it hang down with black screen for about 10 minutes, so I just forced shutdown with laptop power button. And now Windows doesn't load again. This time it finds administrator profile, but cant find any system restore points, though several restore points were present in my system two days ago.
Aforementioned tricks that formerly fixed the problem do not help anymore as system cant find any restore points. No doubts that Comodo causes the issue. Some guy at Malwaretips forum reported similar result, which he caused intentionally in virtual environment for testing purposes by removing all trusted certificates from CFW Trusted Vendors list (along with those of Microsoft), after that his test system couldn't boot too.
So I guess now the only way out for me is to reinstall Windows and all my programs and reconfigure it all to my preferences, which will take two damn days. Thanks to Comodo for an exciting eventful weekend.
While more or less tech savvy people can find solutions in some cases, the average user would end-up with a completely nonfunctional machine and would have to bring it to a maintenance workshop. And I believe this happens not only with free products, but payed versions too. How can you guys provide such a buggy software that causes so much damage and even take money for it!?
I made the paragraph structure more clear for an easier read. Eric